Most of use windows messenger at office as our primary IM. Windows messenger can be used for more than plain IM. Windows messengers allows audio/video Coversation which is useful. But I like application sharing feature of Windows Messenger. Go to Actions and select application sharing. Or follow the steps below suggested by MS

To share your program with someone

1. If Application Sharing is turned on by your network administrator, you can share a program that is open on your computer with one of your contacts.
2. In the main window, right-click the contact on your list with whom you want to share your program, and click Start Application Sharing. —or—
3. If you are in a conversation, click Start Application Sharing in the sidebar.
4. After the invitation is accepted, Stop Collaborating appears in the sidebar. Click it to end the session.
5. If you have not already done so, open the program you want to share. Click the program in the Sharing window, and then click Share.
6. The other person sees your program on his or her computer.
7. If you want to give the other person control of your program, click Allow Control.
8. The other person can also request control, which you can allow or deny.
9. You can take back control by clicking the shared program or pressing ESC on your keyboard.

Notes

1. You can send and receive invitations to use Application Sharing only with people who have computers running Microsoft Windows XP.
2. Both people cannot control the program at the same time; control must pass from one to the other.
3. Make sure you do not block the view of the shared program by having other windows open in front of it.
4. For help with using Application Sharing, click Help in the Application Sharing program. (The Help menu is available only to the invited person, not to the person who sent the invitation.)

Every time you ask a question to your team, collating their answers is a big problem. The usual way to collect the suggestion from a team is to share the excel sheet on LAN and ask them to enter their choice. But this will not work when the team is across the internet. Or if your teams are separated by firewall. Now we have an online application to do the boring collating work for you. Its called CircleUP

What is CircleUp?
It’s a simple, FREE and easy way to ask questions of any community you belong to and get back a single organized result to use and share instead of a blizzard of emails and instant messages.
With CircleUp you can avoid:

• Searching through your inbox to find replies from everyone who responded
• Tracking who replied and who didn’t
• Getting replies to your question sent in different formats
• Having to cut and paste answers into a Word document or Excel spreadsheet to aggregate them
• Getting replies that don’t actually answer your question
• Annoying “reply to all” messages that disrupt the group and clutter your inbox
• Fumbling through your mailbox archives to find old information
• Not being able to share answers with the group or save them for the future

Circleup works with your outlook client or IM or any email provider. None other than you (who is asking the question) needs an account registered at CircleUP. And the answers can be seen only by you.

As some of you know I was out of reach for two days. A mess up with my MX records forced the mails to be lost in the woods of Internet. Only when few friends called me to ask why i didn’t reply; I realized that there is something wrong. My first step was to correct the MX records at my domain name registrar. Then check it from a third party tool to verify everything was OK. There are many such tools available on the net for such look up. I found called DNS Stuff

The DNS stuff gives almost all the services in one clutter free UI. Services like email id lookup; dns lookup; trace route etc. They all are very useful when you do system admin yourself.